Early warm weather means nothing for the entire winter.

It’s only 10 days into December and people are already writing off this winter as being warm with no snow. Kind of funny so early to be downplaying the rest of the winter on just 10 days worth of weather. We are only 11% of the way into meteorological winter. Which means this is the equivalent of saying you are going to lose a football game 6 minutes into the 1st quarter.

So I looked at the previous warm starts to December and what kind of snow we had. Just snow mind you not cold, that I will do another day. So far 9 days in we are currently on pace for the 5th warmest December since 1939. Below you can see this December is red and the average temperatures and rankings since 1939.

The warmer starts to December that rank above this year are 1998,1951,1982 and 2001. So what kind of snow did we see in those winters?

So 9 days in is kind of meaningless and on top of that we will drop even further down the list as cooler air returns tomorrow through the rest of the week. There are all indications the second half of the month will be much cooler. I have much more confidence in it turning cold right now than snowy. The storm track is just too hard to nail down currently. Then timing it out with the cold air is always a huge challenged.

For what it’s worth here’s the short-range climate models looking towards the end of December and early January. These are temperature departures from average.